Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (75 page)

On their first televised concert, if not before, they established their shtick. “Jacques and Julia sizzle,” wrote one journalist. They casually set up dramatic tensions for their Boston University and PBS audiences: he wanted to add more garlic, she wanted to add more liqueur or butter. When she turned her back, he slyly added extra lemon; when he turned his back she added vanilla. Together they prepared a four-course meal with the audience applauding Julia’s one-liners and Jacques’s virtuoso knife techniques (“You can certainly tell who is the professional chef and who is the home cook,” she noted).

During preparations for the second filming, two years later on Boston’s Patriots’ Day (also the day of the Boston Marathon), Julia wanted plain glass bowls, not white ones, for her English pudding. A staff member navigated police blockades and closed stores to find her what she wanted. Instead of putting her boiled potatoes in a Cuisinart, she pressed them through the enormous German potato ricer she had bought in Bonn in the 1950s. While Jacques, who had published
Simple & Healthy Cooking
the year before, prepared the veal, his eyes widened as she added more and more butter to the potatoes. She seemed to delight in quoting Alice B. Toklas: “We don’t want nutrition, we want taste.” When there were friendly disagreements of style, he usually deferred to her or did it his way when her back was turned, much to the delight of the audience. When he suggested putting garlic in the fourth dish, a sauce for the salmon, she tapped her head in despair and exclaimed, “You’re a real garlic freak, aren’t you!” It was delightful theater.

This second show, “More Cooking in Concert,” aired in August and December 1996. Their two “In Concert” shows are the most popular tapes played for PBS fund-raisers around the country.

They also packed the venue for every public appearance together, whether at the Smithsonian “Gala Celebration” in June 1995 or Sotheby’s “Conversation” the next December. At the Smithsonian, which holds sixteen lectures a month, they drew the largest audience on record. At Sotheby’s, two hundred applicants were turned away for a conversation that included Jacques’s Connecticut neighbor Morley Safer of
60 Minutes
. Julia and Jacques were comfortably linked because they both represented education, not commerce, a respect for French culinary techniques, and a distrust of faddishness in cooking. Jacques, with his graduate studies in French literature from Columbia University, was a dean at the French Culinary Institute in New York and the major luminary in the master’s degree program at Boston University. Because teaching was their talent and French cuisine their passion, they teamed up for education and for demonstrations. They were also both professionals in front of an audience and had a familiar repartee and rapport. When a member of one audience asked Julia what her cholesterol level was, she replied, “Medium.” Jacques, after a moment’s pause, added, “Medium rare.”

Julia appeared to some of her associates to have an ambivalent relationship with Jacques, flirting one moment and on another offended by a seeming male condescending remark. One assistant says, “Julia likes to be the event. Neither one likes to share the spotlight. They bicker sometimes before a concert, though they admire each other. But he is a Frenchman and grew up in a French kitchen. Men bang the knife three times on the table to get the noise going before they cut. Women don’t do that. Hut one! Chop, chop, chop.” To a viewer it is clear that when they work together, he takes charge of the preparation, in part because she is not as fast and accurate as she once was. During the taping of “More Cooking in Concert,” she seemed to lean on the demonstration table during the entire performance (she had been on her feet for hours during the preparations). But if he carried the physical labor, she carried the spirit and humor of the evening.

Julia also began appearing with Graham Kerr in 1994, because they played leading roles in the IACP and always announced the winners of the cookbook awards each year. He had never before cooked onstage with anyone. They were a pair of Scots: Graham Kerr in his green plaid kilts and Julia “McWilliams” in her bright jewel-colored dresses. At the 1995 IACP convention in San Antonio, their first filmed “Master Class” was an unfortunate disaster because it was interminable. After six hours, a staff member was reduced to tears, and after all that work Geoffrey was not able to sell the tape to CBS. The second Child-Kerr public cooking took place at a December 1995 PBS fund-raiser in Seattle, where Kerr is based. Sue Huffman of TVFN believes that only Kerr comes close to Julia in connecting directly with a television audience.

For their third teaching appearance (“Birds of a Feather”) at the 1996 IACP national convention in Philadelphia, Julia cooked pheasant
en croûte
, and he roast ostrich tenderloin. She slathered on the butter while he sprayed olive oil and boiled up his aromatic fruits and herbs for sauces. During the banter about butter and the Dr. Dean Ornish no-fat diet, it was Kerr who came across as the tolerant and open-minded cook. When he tasted her heavy sauce at one of their demonstrations, he swallowed hard and said, “I think that as an Englishman I have just been violated.” She turned around immediately and answered, “Really, darling, I did not think it would be that easy!”

When Julia first saw “The Galloping Gourmet” on television early in 1969, she told Simca he was “cute and funny,” but he would be better without a live audience and if he took his cooking more seriously. She and Simca tried one of his suggestions (to add a teaspoon of water to egg white before beating them) and discovered the height of their whipped egg whites was improved. After a serious accident and a religious conversion, Kerr had transformed himself into a sort of dietary disciplinarian in the 1970s. When his wife, Treena, suffered a stroke and then a heart attack in the mid-1980s, he stopped evangelizing and began cooking for her, making his low-fat, low-salt recipes as flavorful and pleasurable as he could. He was editor-at-large for
Cooking Light
, with a 5.7 million circulation, and his books sold 14 million. The “gallop” and alcohol were gone, but Julia found his gray-bearded charm irresistible.

The contrast between Pépin and Kerr is dramatic and may in part explain why the first taping with Kerr was unsuccessful. Whereas Pépin takes charge and pushes the program along, Kerr defers to Julia. Kerr, once the boisterous Englishman (via Australia), is deferential and empathic. One can almost see in his concentration on her that he mouths the words she speaks. “Graham is nonalcoholic and ten percent or less fat, which is absolutely what I am NOT,” says Julia, “so we are each going to do our separate things. He is just charming.” But there does not seem to be an edge to their contrasting philosophies, though the contrast allows some dramatic tension when they cook.

Pépin, Kerr, and the master chefs were happily cooking with Julia, but some questioned whether the country was cooking with her. Despite a plethora of cooking books and cuisines, the ascendancy of pasta and risotto, Julia insisted on the primacy of French cooking techniques. At the Aspen Food and Wine Classic and on the pages of
Food & Wine
, she exclaimed, “Bring Back the Quiche!” The influence of French cooking, according to both Julia and Jacques, was as strong as ever. At the French Culinary Institute, on a recent panel entitled “French Cooking Is Dead, Long Live French Cooking,” they agreed that what was dead was the idea of French cooking, the image of its being heavy cream, which had been dead even longer in France than it had been in the United States. “Classic cuisine died in 1950 with Escoffier,” says Pépin. “We have had the thesis (Escoffier), the antithesis (nouvelle cuisine), and now the synthesis,” he adds.

Perhaps more important is the question whether the American people at the end of the century were eating better than they did in 1961, when
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
was first published. Certainly those who wanted to eat well had far greater access to the best variety of fresh produce; indeed many were eating better than they did in their parents’ home. In 1960 most shops carried only iceberg lettuce and button mushrooms. “It used to be Rice-A-Roni and noodles,” says Zanne Stewart of
Gourmet
, “now there is risotto, couscous, and dozens of other products.” Pépin insists, “The rate at which we have moved forward in produce and cooking in the last decades is faster than in the last hundred years in Europe … and if we keep it up we will have the best in the world.”

But the eating habits of far too many are worse than they have ever been, in part because of the proliferation of fast food (McDonald’s spends nearly $800 million a year on advertising). Julia often pointed out during her appearances that there are more and more books on cooking and a greater variety of produce, but kids are fed at school by pizza franchises. On September 4, 1996, Jane E. Brody reported in the
New York Times
that the American diet improved over the last three decades, but that only 25 percent of the people were eating healthy diets. The diets of wealthy whites were improved, the diets of poor blacks deteriorated, “a discrepancy the researchers attributed to the difference in ability to afford substantial amounts of meat and other foods high in saturated fat.” The study measured “improvement” on the basis of saturated fat and consumption of grains, fruits, and vegetables (not on taste or artistry).

The junk food versus good cooking battle will always be fought, and people on both extremes will choose their statistics to argue which side is “winning.” There are paradoxes aplenty. Brody points out that more skim milk is now consumed, but more burgers and fries as well. Four and a half million Americans watch
The French Chef on
TVFN, but in 1996 the Pillsbury Bake-Off winner (the first man in its forty-seven-year history) won a million dollars for inventing a recipe made of packaged devil’s food cake mix, canned sliced pears, sweetened condensed milk, eggs, chocolate chips, macadamia nuts, and butterscotch-caramel fudge topping (for a whopping 460 calories a serving). Only the eggs were fresh (one hopes).

When news of what is called the French paradox reached the growing army of American food writers via CBS’s
60 Minutes
, Julia Child and the French chefs in America seemed at least momentarily vindicated. “Why aren’t the French dropping like flies?” asked Jeffrey Steingarten,
Vogue’s
food editor (and one of the many men at Harvard Law School who used to regularly watch
The French Chef)
. The paradox is that the French, who eat fat goose liver (foie gras) and drink red wine, have lower cholesterol, lower obesity, and fewer heart attacks and other cardiovascular diseases. At this news, Americans nearly emptied the shelves of the cholesterol-lowering red wine—but for the usual puritan reasons (self-improvement).

The paradoxes are evident in restaurants as well as in homes. Restaurant diners are experimenting with all kinds of ethnic cuisines, displaying a more sophisticated American palate. But the “fusion” of these cuisines (Thai barbecue pizza) threatens to blur the native cuisines. On the other hand, one of the most popular books of 1996 was Rozanne Gold’s
Recipes 1-2-3
, using recipes with no more than three ingredients. Doomsayers point to the number of major French restaurant closings, citing Ma Maison, La Toque, L’Escoffier, and L’Ermitage—yet Le Cirque remains. France was suffering even more, it seemed: Alexandre Lazareff told a conference at the French Culinary Institute in 1996 that twenty years ago in France one could count from fifty to a hundred great restaurants that were prospering; now, after years of recession, he can name only twelve.

Competition in both television and publishing grew with the interest in food during the last decade of the century. Approximately 700 cookbooks were published in 1995 alone, racking up more than $50 million in sales.
Stand Facing the Stove
, a dual biography of Irma Rombauer and her daughter Marion Becker, who had edited
The Joy of Cooking
until 1975, was published late in 1996. A “reissue” of
Joy
, Julia’s first cookbook when she became Mrs. Child, was being rewritten by committee, “a parade of superstars,” Laura Shapiro called them. When Shapiro asked the woman hiring and firing this “Keystone Kops in the Kitchen” why so many writers were needed for a book once written by Mrs. Rombauer, the editor declared that cooking had grown so complex no one cook could know both cakes and meats.

B
AKING WITH JULIA

In her eighty-fourth year, Julia played her final “Alistair Cookie” role in
Baking with Julia
, a television series with master bakers (“Baking is anything that has flour in it,” she explained); no one had yet done a baking series for television. Moreover, the most popular segment of their
Cooking with Master Chefs
was with Nancy Silverton baking her La Brea bread, and two of the most successful programs on
In Julia’s Kitchen with Master Chefs
were with Carol Field of San Francisco baking Italian bread and Jim Dodge of Montpelier, Vermont, making chocolate fudge cake and apple pie. For this series, Julia agreed to write the introduction to a book based on the series, but this time she refused to write the book.

The controversy over the accompanying book began in 1995 when, after Julia insisted she would not write another book and Geoffrey hired Dorie Greenspan to author the book itself, he mailed multiple submissions of his (A La Carte Communications’) proposal to several publishers for bidding because he needed a large advance to finance the filming. Judith Jones was surprised and angered by the multiple submissions, and Knopf did not make a bid, knowing that a bidding war would drive up the price of the book. Ink spilled in
Publishers Weekly
and the
New York Times
, leaving the impression first that Knopf was dropping its longtime author and second that Knopf refused to relinquish electronic rights (though it had relinquished them for the first two books of the series). Misleadingly, the issue looked like it was part of the larger battle of the 1990s for writers to control their own electronic rights. A La Carte’s lawyer, Carl DeSantis, told
Publishers Weekly
it was over “control of electronic rights.” Yet both Judith Jones and Jane Friedman at Knopf/Random House insist that “it had nothing to do with electronic rights.”